The Value of Anthropology

Noticing and Challenging the Magic Counting Dragon

This is the first of the three-part essay “The Value of Anthropology” by Paula K Clarke and W Ted Hamilton. To read the next two installments, “Less Than Disinterested Observers: Noticing and Challenging the Magic Counting Dragon” and “What Anthropology Can and Should Do: Notice and Witness Magic Counting” visit the Academic Affairs section of anthropology-news.org in mid-January. AAA members are invited to post comments to continue Clarke and Hamilton’s discussion online, and anyone can rate, share, or just read the series through April.

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor

—Campbell’s Law (1988, p 360)

We must educate people on what nobody knew yesterday and prepare people in our schools for what no one knows yet, but what some people must know tomorrow.

—Margaret Mead

An important essay “The Value of Anthropology” written by Lloyd Miller appeared in Anthropology News in December 2011. The essay, addressing the marginalization of anthropology offerings in higher education, proposed as a remedy a strategy that might best be described as hitting the target while also missing the mark. If, as the essay suggests, the goal is to demonstrate anthropology’s contributions to the development of collegiate competencies (eg, reading, writing, speaking, reasoning, thinking critically) this outcome is unlikely to result from simply providing “more American citizens with an anthropological knowledge and perspective.”

As the December 2011 article in part describes, the marginalization of anthropology is a symptom of a much larger endemic problem throughout higher education, namely the speed and convenience values associated with larger market forces that have essentially captured institutions in recent decades. The proposed remedy mistakenly ignores this larger matter. If anthropology wishes to demonstrate its contributions to the development of what are commonly recognized as college competencies without challenging these larger market driven values, its efforts are likely to realize limited success.

In reviewing the history of institutional assessment practices, aka outcome-based-assessment (OBA), Francine Jacobs points out these speed and convenience models were not designed for the conditions to which they are now being applied (Applied Developmental Science 7 [62–75]. In fact under current conditions, marked by extreme strain in many instances, the practices are likely to produce false positive as well as false negative assessments; wrongly suggesting successful outcomes (eg, college graduates with high grades and limited competencies) and wrongly suggesting failure as well (eg, failing and dropping out can be and often is a part of eventual success), a subject we return to in detail in Part Two. In other words, focusing on short term, easy to measure, attainable rather than desirable goals represents more of a barrier than a conduit for understanding the development of the competencies in question. As a result, strategies aimed at competency acquisition that do not challenge the hidden-in-plain-sight features of what we are calling “the magic counting dragon” (mcd) are stymied from the onset.

The “mcd” is a symbol representing the cultural forces that confer a kind of security and legitimacy in human activity. In an era of scientific inquiry marked by what has been called “the statistical style” (Kwa, Styles of Knowing: A New History of Science from Ancient Times to the Present, 2011) numbers are a central feature of our magic system, the human effort invested in virtually all cultures in increasing the efficiency of a desired outcome (eg, in farming, love, sports). The numbers tell us how we should feel about our world, how much we should worry—are Stock Market numbers going up or down, are job growth numbers up or down, is the economy growing, stagnant or slowing? The dilemma in all cultures is that the magic chosen for efficiency and mastery can and often does become the master (Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control, 2008). We keep feeding the magic dragon what we believe it wants because we fear the consequences of failing to do so. But often, when times change, the dragon has lost the influence that it once had. In these conditions, though human effort fails to realize the expected outcome from feeding the dragon it continues with the familiar practice: As an example, the foot binding (magic) in pre-modern China that increased the value of a female and the chances of a good marriage continued even after Chinese society began to change, even when it became a disadvantage. More college degrees, speed through the institution, creating success by removing challenge all feed the quest for ‘numbers,’ but they do not feed the development of collegiate competencies.

These numbers are not proxies for college competencies because they no longer have the power that they once had. The mcd represents the source of real cultural power, what is counted. While numbers may very well be pure and true what is being counted hardly ever is (Blastland and Dilnot, The Numbers Game, 2009). What is counted (graduation rates, grades, matriculation speed) and what is not counted (eg, college competencies) both represent cultural choices with moral implications whose consequences may be subject to changed conditions. The mcd represents the power of the forces behind the numbers.

Under these circumstances, what anthropology can do and is uniquely suited to do involve demystifying— unmasking—market incentives and naming them for what they are, a “magic system” of counting designed to achieve mastery and control in an institutional setting rapidly losing what it claims to be securing. In other words, we suggest an additional strategy to the remedy proposed in the 2011 AN article so that efforts have a better chance of hitting both the target and the mark. Much like magic dragons in general, the power of this magic counting dragon is largely a function of a reluctance to notice and challenge it. This is what anthropology is uniquely suited to do.

The subjects of the second (Less Than Disinterested Observers) and the third (What Anthropology Can and Should Do) part of this series describe how we arrived at our conclusions and some specific recommendations for anthropology.

Paula K Clarke (clarkep@yosemite.edu ) received the AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology, 2008.

W Ted Hamilton (hamiltont@yosemite.edu ) was named Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2004.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/01/09/the-value-of-anthropology/